Geeky confession: I was excited to wake up & see @ScienceChannel RTed me: http://is.gd/7bQ1Jh . Geeky dream: Ideally, 1 day I'll be on it.
— Ariel Waldman (@arielwaldman) June 23, 2011
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Five years ago I revealed on Twitter that one of my geek dreams was to appear on the Science Channel. Little did I know that a few months later I would be appearing on the SyFy channel, which was a lot of fun and deepened my desire. And now, five years later, I will appear on the Science Channel! Appearing on TV is something very near and dear to me because of how central a role TV shows, documentaries and films have played in inspiring me to be where I am today.I had never self-identified as a science geek, but I always enjoyed watching science documentaries. In 2008, I was watching the documentary When We Left Earth on the Discovery Channel that captured the story of NASA sending a human into space. The documentary interviewed people who had worked in mission control at the time and shared their story of how they didn't know anything about orbits or rocketry or spacecrafts – they were figuring it out as they went. As a millennial who had grown up in Kansas and attended art school, this was new information to me and I found it incredibly inspiring. I didn't know anything about space exploration either, but all of a sudden I wanted to work at NASA, too! I took that inspiration and shortly thereafter emailed NASA a fangirl letter to volunteer myself. Very unexpectedly, I ended up getting a job at NASA from that email. The rest is history, aka my biography to date.Tomorrow my dream from five years ago will be realized when I be appear on the Science Channel! The show is called How To Build Everything (#HowToBuild) and it airs on Wednesdays 10pm Eastern (9pm Central, 7pm Pacific). I'll be talking about how to build an interplanetary rover! I'll also be in a couple of upcoming episodes talking about how to build spacesuits and rocketships. Below is a shot of me from filming last year. Tune in!